The first "washing machine" was a scrub board, invented in 1797, according to the Association of Home Appliance Manufacturers (AHAM). Compared with pounding clothes on rocks, it must have seemed groundbreaking - but laundry innovation was just getting started. Eighty years later, a corn planter manufacturer came up with a wash-tub with a manually powered inner mechanism to scrub clothes. Sales took off and competitors entered the washing machine business. Two significant, lasting innovations came in 1918, when Launderette launched a washer that extracted water using centrifugal force, and in 1922, when Maytag came up with the concept of an agitator to push waster through the clothes as they were washed. In 1949, just 152 years after the scrub board, the first automatic washing machine hit the market. The chore of plothes washing was easier than it had ever been.
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